The Prophetic Protestant
Or just a coincidence?

Here's some fascinating perspectives from the Protestant Philadelphia Church of God newspaper, The Trumpet; The entire article is well worth the read. (emphasis mine)

The Significance of Anglicans Turning Catholic
November 14, 2007

A conservative Anglican communion is pleading to be incorporated into the Church of Rome. Reflecting a broader trend, the significance of this event is destined to grow with time. A forecast made in the 1930s is making its way into today’s headlines.

Those headlines would be easy enough to pass over, but they are worth taking a moment to think about. They represent a dangerous weakening of British sovereignty that first glance wouldn’t suggest. Not only that, they confirm just how far ahead of his time was the man making the forecast.

It is against this backdrop that this headline appeared in late October: “Traditional Anglicans ask for full communion with Catholics.”

The Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) is a group of churches with a worldwide membership approaching half a million people. It formed in 1990 from a dozen Anglican churches that broke away from the 80-million-strong Anglican Communion (of which the Church of England is the heart), mostly to protest the liberalism creeping into that organization.

From its beginning, the TAC has had a spiritual affinity with Roman Catholics. Shortly after it formed, it began informal consultations with the Vatican on how to gain formal recognition as part of the Catholic Church. The primate of the group, Archbishop John Hepworth, says, “We have no doctrinal difference with Rome.”

Archbishop Hepworth says, “Unity with Peter is a biblical imperative,” referring to the pope’s claim to be the rightful successor to the Apostle Peter. “What is important, and we are having to learn as a community,” he says, “is to ask not what we think, but what the church says, and five centuries of bad habits are going to die hard.”

Thus, in October, the TAC sent a letter, the text of which was unanimously agreed upon by the communion’s bishops and vicars-general, formally requesting “full, corporate and sacramental union” with the Roman Catholic Church.

This is the situation as it stands. A statement in the British newspaper Catholic Herald in December 1993 appears more and more true: “The days of the Anglican Church are numbered, and most of its worshipers will return to the true faith of their distant medieval forebears.”

Should that prediction occur, it would fully vindicate a similar, far earlier forecast.

For half a century, Herbert W. Armstrong served as editor in chief of what was, during its apex in the 1980s, the world’s most popular newsmagazine, the Plain Truth. Its pages often prophesied of an event that for decades many considered an impossibility—the unification of Protestants with their Roman Catholic mother church. Mr. Armstrong foretold the event as far back as 1934, the year the magazine began.

A sample, from the October 1961 Plain Truth edition: “The pope will step in as the supreme unifying authority—the only one that can finally unite the differing nations of Europe. … Europe will go Roman Catholic! Protestantism will be absorbed into the ‘Mother’ Church—and totally abolished.”

It is because of statements such as these that the Trumpet, which follows the Plain Truth’s pattern of Bible-based news analysis, has closely watched efforts by religious leaders to bring Protestant churches back into communion with the Vatican. These latest moves among Anglicans fit the mold in an astonishing way.